Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics

Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed

Computer Forensics and Cyber Attacks

During investigative activities in the field of contrasting tax evasion and fraud, it is known that law enforcement agencies are increasingly encountering digital documents, which are slowly replacing the paper ones. The chapter has the purpose to explain as data, extracted from an electronic device, turns into evidence in court. The authors describe how hidden data (metadata) can become forensic evidence. In particular, the chapter examines the metadata contained in digital photos, which conceal a mass of data whose existence is not normally suspected. The second part of the chapter consists of miscellaneous cyber-attack descriptions in which computer forensics can be applied. It is finally described how one can protect systems against a cyber-attacks